


Artificial Intelligence

by Kittycat01



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Dark, Dystopia, Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 08:40:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10963659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittycat01/pseuds/Kittycat01





	Artificial Intelligence

Ever since the last update to the artificial intelligence had been issued, all I had received was grief.

It was a drizzly grey day, and I could tell just by looking out my window that the weather wouldn't change today. I went through my morning routine on autopilot, barely even tasting my everyday breakfast of toast and black coffee. The water in the shower ran cold, it seemed the boiler was failing. I slipped into the same clothes that I wore all week, and skipped brushing my hair leaving it to air dry. There was no one left to impress.

Once I was in my car, I began my drive to the office in central London. Usually the drive from my house through the busy streets would take close to an hour and a half. Today it took twenty minutes. In my mirrors I watched the shattered glass of shop displays, and the deserted streets filled with rubbish go past. Regent Street, Picadilly Circus, once they were filled to the brim with people, it was claustrophobic to watch, now they are empty.

The streets were bare nowadays, there was barely anyone left, the robots had made sure of that. I wondered to myself who would be in the office, or if there was even anyone left to come in. 

I remembered the days when the artificial intelligence had just been released, the bots designed to take care of humanity and they looked like us too! Everyone in the field had been just short of begging to be on my team, the waiting list for orders of the robots was longer than I am tall, and my secretary joked about quitting for stress from all the phone calls she received praising our work. 

Now nobody wanted to be on my team, my secretary had quit from stress, only the calls were death threats for me, cursing me for my work. It didn't just stop there, I had become infamous, and was scarcely out of the headlines. Only they called me evil and cold blooded instead of excellent and a genius. 

I read through the code that I had written for the robots, looking for the fault. That had to be the root of the problem, after all, no robot just decides to go on a killing spree. There had been malfunctions before, that was only natural, but they had never been this big.

I remember the first day of the attacks, the fear in the eyes of every person I saw. The casualties that day were only thirteen, but the damage had already been done. People began fleeing London like it was out of fashion. The fear was mainly caused by no one being able to tell who was a robot and who was a human. We had succeeded in making them look life like. 

When the rest of the world heard what had happened in London, there had been an outrage. All sorts of people with lots of influence were calling me and everyone who worked with me murderers. This lead to me loosing half of my team overnight.

Naturally people had come into England too. Gamers and adrenaline junkies came flooding in, people who wanted to be a hero and save the day. They treated it like they had stepped through the screen, and treated this harsh new reality as a perverse video game. They were stripped to their most primal instincts, living in the rubble of buildings, and bathing in the blood stained river. They lived like this although there were many luxurious houses that were abandoned, they wanted to live out the video games they had spent months playing, to experience destruction and chaos for themselves.

I'd watched them, huddled around makeshift fires in the endless empty offices and car parks, eating the flesh off anything they could find. They were wiped out one by one by the robots. I'd developed quite an eye for the robots, I could tell in an instant who was mechanical and who was natural. They tended to divide themselves into groups of around seven, that I referred to as packs as they were hostile to other groups. There were often packs with a robot in them, biding their time before they killed the humans one by one. 

The robots left me, their maker. I don't know why but they never targeted me. They never came after me. I spent many hours joking that they viewed me as their god, so they would never kill me.

I spent hours looking through line after line of faultless code. There really was no problem. There had to be a problem, no robot would just kill thousands of people, leaving London as something out of a dystopia novel.

But then I realised, there wasn't a problem. The robots were designed to help humans. They had heard the recent news about overpopulation in London, in their eyes they were helping the humans. The realisation chilled me to the bone.


End file.
